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Monday, January 23, 2012

CHRONICLES: Here Comes The Sun

After a week of snow and freezing temperatures, here's the sun!

The snow started Monday or Tuesday. We were forecast to get one to three inches. After a few hours, we had almost ten inches. So we plowed the driveway, and got it as clear as we could before the temperature dropped. It did drop. Boy did it drop.

I've found that four degrees next to the ocean feels a hell of a lot colder than four degrees at a dry elevation of seven thousand feet. I had heard that it's the humidity that gets into your bones and chills you.

At any rate, after shovelling and taking all of the appropriate measures, I found myself longing for a nice, warm shower followed by a bowl of chili. I got all ready for my shower, when I turned the knob in the bath tub. An ominous gurgling sound followed, accompanied by nothing. The pipes were frozen.

From my time spent in the van, I always have a water bottle on me, so I wasn't worried about making it through the evening. The next day, I took every water bottle I had to work and filled them all up. As a last resort, I could always melt some snow and boil it. It never came to that, though. I had plenty of water for dishes, drinking, and hand washing. And since I'm a guy, stepping out to use the facilities was no big deal.

After a week of shovelling a total of three feet of snow, sliding around on the slick roads, donning gloves and a beanie, turning on the water and hoping, after all of that, the temperature warmed up. The rain began to fall. The snow washed off the shoveled ground. The pipes thawed out, and today, ah today, the sun shone through the clouds.

Perhaps the only regret I have was that there was an intense solar flare, the largest one since 2005, which could have lit up our sky with a beautiful
Aurora Borealis had it not been for the cloud cover. Still, it's been an incredible week!